International Business Machines Corp's gain in its $3.5 billion acquisition of PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting is no loss for rival Hewlett-Packard Co., an HP senior executive said on Tuesday.
HP has turned down overtures from PWC for months, said HP's deputy head of services, Vice President Juergen Rottler in an interview with Reuters.
IBM, the No. 1 technology services company, said on Tuesday it would buy PWC Consulting for $3.5 billion in cash and stock, adding the consultant's 30,000 employees to its own 150,000.
"PWC has approached us over the course of the last year on multiple occasions with exactly that same question... would we be interested in an acquisition? On all occasions we declined," Rottler said.
HP almost bought PWC Consulting in 2000 but backed out over the price, some $18 billion at the time.
Since then, HP has changed its strategy, preferring to work with a host of systems integrators such as PWC rather than becoming a systems integrator itself, Rottler said.
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